Politics|Why Trump Stands by Roy Moore, Even as It Fractures His Party

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Why Trump Stands by Roy Moore, Even as It Fractures His Party

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President Trump came out in defense of Roy Moore, the Republican Senate candidate from Alabama. But when it’s not in his political interests, the benefit of the doubt might shift.CreditCreditKevin Lamarque/Reuters

By the time Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, made the last of his repeated pleas to President Trump to keep his distance from the Senate candidacy of Roy S. Moore, it was too late.

To Mr. McConnell, only the president could extinguish a fire that he sees as endangering Republicans’ Senate majority. But Mr. Trump, speaking by phone last Tuesday with Mr. McConnell, responded with the same argument he had been making for days inside the White House.

The women who have called Mr. Moore a sexual predator, the president believes, may not be telling the truth.

“Forty years is a long time. He’s run eight races, and this has never come up,” Mr. Trump said to the television cameras on the South Lawn hours after his conversation with Mr. McConnell, effectively endorsing Mr. Moore before boarding Marine One. “He says it didn’t happen,” the president added. “You have to listen to him, also.”

Mr. Trump’s decision to reject every long-shot plan to save the Senate seat reflects the imperative that an unpopular president faces to retain his political base, a determination that he should follow his own instincts after having felt steered into a disastrous earlier endorsement in the Alabama race, and even his insistence that he himself has been the victim of false accusations of sexual misconduct.

But in tying himself to Mr. Moore even as congressional leaders have abandoned the candidate en masse, the president has reignited hostilities with his own party just as Senate Republicans are rushing to pass a politically crucial tax overhaul. Mr. McConnell and his allies have been particularly infuriated as Mr. Trump has reacted with indifference to a series of ideas they have floated to try to block Mr. Moore.

The accusations against Mr. Moore have lifted Democrats’ hopes of notching a rare victory in the Deep South in next month’s special election, which would narrow the Republican Senate majority to a single seat. Just as significantly, the president has handed the Democrats a political weapon with which to batter Republicans going into the midterm elections: that they tolerate child predation.

“I was surprised, and I think it’s a high-risk move,” said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has established a rapport with Mr. Trump.

As Mr. Moore has rejected calls to drop out even as more women have accused him of preying on them when they were teenagers, Republicans have given up any hope that he will fold his campaign. Mr. Trump has repeatedly told his aides that he does not believe Mr. Moore would ever quit.

What the president did not foresee was that the friction would reach inside his immediate family. He vented his annoyance when his daughter Ivanka castigated Mr. Moore by saying there was “a special place in hell for people who prey on children,” according to three staff members who heard his comments.

But something deeper has been consuming Mr. Trump. He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently. (In the hours after it was revealed in October 2016, Mr. Trump acknowledged that the voice was his, and he apologized.)

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Roy S. Moore at a news conference this month in Birmingham, Ala. Mr. Moore has rejected calls to drop out even as more women have accused him of preying on them when they were teenagers.CreditBrynn Anderson/Associated Press

So Mr. Trump has been particularly open to the idea, pushed by Mr. Moore’s defenders, that the candidate is being wrongly accused, even as Mr. McConnell and a parade of other Republicans have said they believe the accusers. When a group of senators gathered with the president in the White House last week to discuss the tax overhaul, it took little to get Mr. Trump onto the topic of Mr. Moore — and he immediately offered up the same it-was-40-years-ago defense, according to officials at the meeting.

Mr. Trump’s responses to the Moore revelations have been pronounced but not consistent. He accepted the candidate’s initial denials, and then was shocked at how tepid Mr. Moore appeared when asked during an interview with Sean Hannity whether he still maintained his innocence, according to one person close to the president.

Privately, Mr. Trump has acknowledged that he is making a cold political calculus in the hope that the Republicans will hold on to the seat. A White House official on Saturday reiterated the president’s view that he believes Mr. Moore should quit the race if the allegations are proved true, but the official stressed that the candidate has denied them.

Absent action from Mr. Trump, party leaders have explored — and abandoned — a number of ways to derail Mr. Moore. They considered recruiting another Republican to run a write-in campaign against Mr. Moore and Mr. Jones, but two private polls showed that such a candidacy would have no chance of success.

Both polls, commissioned by Republican groups in mid-November, found Mr. Jones leading Mr. Moore in a head-to-head election and winning handily in a three-way race, according to people who reviewed the results. Public polls have indicated a very close race.

Mr. McConnell and his allies have believed for weeks that disaster awaits, win or lose, if Mr. Moore remains in the race: Either the Democrats will claim the seat on Dec. 12, or Mr. Moore will win and thrust the party into an agonizing monthslong debate over whether to expel him.

The Senate leader has told fellow Republicans in private that Mr. Moore’s nomination has endangered the party’s hold on the Senate, according to people who have spoken with him — his starkest acknowledgment so far that the political environment has turned sharply against his party since Mr. Trump’s election. Mr. McConnell has also reiterated his intention to move against Mr. Moore if he is elected, though Mr. McConnell has made clear that he thinks that the candidate is unlikely to win.

Otherwise loyal Senate Republicans have started putting some distance between themselves and the president, a breach that could grow wider in the event of expulsion proceedings.

“As much as people would like to assume that, as Louis XIV said, ‘I am the state,’ there is more than one person who represents the Republican Party, and the preponderance of the party has dissociated itself from Moore,” said Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana.

The president blindsided congressional Republicans with his defense of Mr. Moore, who was a polarizing figure — he has said homosexual conduct should be illegal — well before being accused of making sexual advances on minors when he was a district attorney in his 30s.

Mr. McConnell even enlisted Washington campaign lawyers with experience in Alabama elections to devise a four-page memo outlining a legal avenue to block Mr. Moore’s path, but the White House counsel’s office ignored the document entirely. “All you can do is identify a way out of the mess, and if people don’t want to follow it, that’s on them,” said Josh Holmes, one of Mr. McConnell’s closest political advisers.

Mr. McConnell and his lieutenants considered a write-in candidacy and found the prospect of wooing Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whose old seat is in play, to be especially appealing.

And Senate Republicans initially seemed to have allies in the West Wing: Mr. McConnell found Mr. Trump and Vice President Mike Pence to be receptive when he first talked to them about disavowing Mr. Moore.

But even before Mr. Trump returned to American soil, he was becoming uneasy about making such a break.

Flying back from Asia, Mr. Trump was told by aides that the Republican National Committee was handling the Moore situation. Some of Mr. Trump’s advisers insisted that the move to cut off funds was wise, but by the time he returned to the White House, he had heard from others who thought the decision was misguided, according to two officials close to the president.

Soon after, the president’s former chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, began aggressively urging Mr. Trump not to break with Mr. Moore, arguing that he should not get crosswise with his voter base, although it was not clear if the two men spoke directly. The president is still smarting over his decision to fly into Alabama in September on behalf of Senator Luther Strange, the appointee holding the seat, only to see Mr. Strange lose a runoff by over nine points.

Mr. Pence, after initially issuing a statement critical of Mr. Moore, has since followed the president’s lead. At a recent meeting of the Republican Governors Association, Mr. Pence spoke privately with Gov. Kay Ivey of Alabama, according to Republican officials familiar with the conversation.

The vice president inquired about the governor’s view of the matter, but did not press Ms. Ivey on Mr. Moore. She signaled no willingness to intervene, only reiterating to Mr. Pence that Alabamians would render their judgment and that the election take place next month as scheduled. (When Senator Richard C. Shelby, Alabama’s most senior lawmaker, called Ms. Ivey, she barely let him begin speaking before bluntly informing him that she would not change the date.)

Mr. Trump has not spoken with Ms. Ivey, which has made Mr. McConnell’s final Hail Mary a nonstarter.

The campaign lawyers commissioned by the Senate leader last week sent a memo to the White House counsel, Donald F. McGahn II, arguing that, based on Alabama precedent, if Mr. Strange were to resign, Ms. Ivey could appoint a new senator. They also made the case that Ms. Ivey was within her rights to delay the special election.

“Our recommendation is to combine Steps 1 and 2: Strange resigns; the governor fills the vacancy with a new appointee; and the governor delays the special election to give the new appointee time to run as an independent candidate,” the lawyers wrote.

Should Mr. Jones win, Democrats would need to take only two more seats in 2018 to regain a majority in the Senate — still a difficult task, but one nearly unimaginable just a month ago. A victory for Mr. Moore could be just as punishing for Republicans, because it could taint their candidates across the country by association with a man accused of child molestation.

Scott Jennings, a Republican strategist close to Mr. McConnell, said the race had developed into a no-win situation.

“Either we’re saddled with a Democrat in a seat that ought to be Republican,” Mr. Jennings said, “or we’re saddled with a brand anvil that’s going to drag down the president, drag down the Senate, drag down the party and plunge the Senate into immediate turmoil when he gets there.”

For its part, Mr. Moore’s campaign is thrilled to have the president’s tacit support and is promising to highlight it.

“We’re going to make it clear to the voters of Alabama that Roy Moore is the candidate to help President Trump get a conservative Supreme Court and cut taxes,” said Brett Doster, a top Moore adviser. “That will be included in our ads, definitely.”

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Defense Of Moore Adds To G.O.P. Split. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe